Immediately
forget any preconceptions you may have about Salman Rushdie and the controversy
that has swirled around his million-dollar head. You should instead know
that he is one of the best contemporary writers of fables and parables,
from any culture. Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a delightful tale about
a storyteller who loses his skill and a struggle against mysterious forces
attempting to block the seas of inspiration from which all stories are
derived. Here's a representative passage about the sources and power of
inspiration:

So
Iff the water genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Stream of Stories,
and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the
magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the
water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and
one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out
of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and
Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured
strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the
Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that
had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented
could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the
biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here
in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions
of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories;
so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was
much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead, but alive. "And
if you are very, very careful, or very, very highly skilled, you can dip
a cup into the Ocean," Iff told Haroun, "like so," and
here he produced a little golden cup from another of his waistcoat pockets,
"and you can fill it with water from a single, pure Stream of Story,
like so," as he did precisely that.